Tuesday, March 29, 2011

With the news that Apple’s already sold-out summer developer conference is a software-related show focused on Mac OS X Lion and iOS 5 (which apparently won’t be ready for prime time until Fall), TechCrunch chimed in with new purported details regarding the next major version of Apple’s mobile operating system. Author MG Siegler re-iterated claims that WWDC will only see a preview of iOS 5 come June 6, with the final code slated for a Fall launch. Then he added:

A year ago, Apple bought Siri, a virtual personal assistant startup that had released a very cool iPhone app. The Siri team and technology are now said to be a big part of iOS 5. The use of Siri’s artificial intelligence and assistance technology is said to be deeply integrated into the OS for all the different services offered. And the team is now putting the finishing touches on the elements that will be demoed at WWDC, we hear. This tech may also be opened to developers for use in third-party apps — though that information isn’t quite as concrete.Watchful readers will remember this being a long-standing rumor…We imagine Siri search intelligence will augment Apple’s own mapping technology which in itself stems from acquisitions of mapping startups Placebase in the summer of 2009 and Poly9 in January of last year. Since then, a lot of clues have surfaced pointing at an Apple-branded mapping service, the latest being several new job openings seeking engineers to “radically improve” iOS mapping and location services. Apple is thought to be pursuing such a service in order to reduce its dependency on Google’s mapping data and services in iOS gadgets.

Update: We’ve recieved reports from a number of Israeli readers who told us it is the local Apple reseller outfit iDigital that is opening a huge store.

According to the Jerusalem Post Apple is looking to open a 5000 square-meter store (that’s 54K square feet! – which seems unlikely) in Jerusalem, Israel. The report claims this store will house the “Apple Digital Library,” and if anyone knows what that is feel free to let us know. Apple is yet to house an official store in the state of Israel and the reason for the location being Jerusalem is for “symbolic reasons.”

The directors of Apple in Israel recently toured the site and reportedly said they wanted to bring the country’s largest Apple store to Jerusalem for symbolic reasons. According to city planners, the area at the western entrance to the city will become the hi-tech economic center of Jerusalem due to the high-speed Jerusalem-Tel Aviv train and the light rail, both of which have stops there.We’re not sure how Apple could manage to fit such a large store in such a small area 5000sq. meters= 53,000 square feet which would make it among the world’s biggest), maybe the report has some facts mixed up. Either way, the more Apple Stores, the merrier.

Amazon’s online bazaar for Android software opened for business a week ago and today a useful new feature went live. The call it Test Drive and it lets you sample apps before buying – in your desktop browser. No such thing exists neither on Google’s own Android Market nor Apple’s App Store. It works like magic, really. You just visit the Amazon Appstore on your desktop, select an app and hit the “Test Drive now” button.

Up pops a new window that’s basically a full-fledged Android operating system virtualized in the cloud. You can test the chosen app here, but also use the virtual machine to browser the web using Android’s virtual browser, listen to music, browse image galleries and more. It’s a stunning example of the cloud power leveraging Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud technology, the online retailer explains:

Clicking the “Test drive now” button launches a copy of this app on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), a web service that provides on-demand compute capacity in the cloud for developers. When you click on the simulated phone using your mouse, we send those inputs over the Internet to the app running on Amazon EC2 – just like your mobile device would send a finger tap to the app. Our servers then send the video and audio output from the app back to your computer. All this happens in real time, allowing you to explore the features of the app as if it were running on your mobile device.I’m inclined to believe Apple is already hard at work on copying this neat feat, though more likely as part of iTunes rather than in Flash…

In addition to this Amazon-specific try-before-you-buy feature, Google’s Android Market gained last year a cool option to beam purchased apps to all your authorized devices with a click of the mouse. Apple has neither, for now. The rumor mill is sending mixed signals about an alleged cloud iTunes service.

App Store items are now visible on the web and there’s nothing technically precluding Apple from adding a cloud-based iPhone Simulator layer to try our apps in a browser. Speculating further, should they utilize an OnLive-like interactive video streaming, we might be able to test drive even high-quality games in real-time.

Well, that didn’t take long. Apple has just sold out of WWDC 2011 tickets.

*thanks 9to5Mac*

We wanted to go however we couldn't find a combination of flight/hotel at a decent price before all of the tickets where sold out.. If anyone who purchased a ticket and can't go or would like to donate a ticket please contact us asap...